Sad, that years of neglect have come to this, but Ken Mehlman was making his pitch today in Milwaukee for African Americans to give the GOP another chance:
“Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization,” Mr. Mehlman told his audience. “I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong.”
Alluding to the rise of the Republican Party in the South since the civil right movement nearly a half-century ago, Mr. Mehlman said that “if my party benefited from racial polarization in the past, it is the Democratic Party that benefits from it today.”
Make no mistake, this is just another round of hardball Republican tactics, after years of voter suppression, most recently in Ohio. The unspoken message — we took your rights away, and you have to come to us to get them back. Where else are you going to go, you can almost hear Mehlman saying … that other party has made it clear that they won’t stand with black lawmakers, let alone black voters.
One almost couldn’t blame black Americans if they thought … “hmmmmmm, he’s a lying sack of shit, but what the hell, being LOYAL hasn’t worked out so well, time for some hardball.”
Howard Dean offered a counterpoint today to Mehlman’s plea for “forgiveness”:
I’m here to tell you that the Democratic Party is going to stand up for the things we believe in. We’re going to stand for social justice. We’ll never take a single African American vote for granted. We’re going to show up now, not eight weeks before an election. And we’re going to put organizers in all 50 states.
For more than 95 years, you have been the conscience of our nation, and the message of your work is a powerful one – when we come together around shared goals and common principles, great things are possible. Historic things are possible. People of all races, nationalities and faiths have united in the NAACP on a fundamental premise – that all men and women are created equal.
The Democratic Party shares this mission, and we share common goals in the fight for fairness and equality for every one. We believe that everyone is equal in the eyes of God…
That all sounds great. Many of us on the left are big fans of Howard Dean, but we couldn’t blame them if the delegates at the NAACP convention took all of that with a grain of salt. After all, the other guys have done a pretty damned good job of gaining power by stealing access to the polls, maybe it’s time to go to their fence and buy back what was stolen.
After years of neglect, Dean has got a long fight ahead of him to win back some trust, and I wouldn’t blame the NAACP to play coy to protect their community.
How very sad that the party of the Southern Strategy has played the Democrats so well. Perhaps the only way to save the Democratic Party from the corporate handmaidens now running it is to appeal to the other side. Perhaps it’s time for various communities of the Democratic Party base to start making the party WORK for their votes.
